Chapter XI: Appendix: Wagner, Berlioz, Liszt, and Mr. Ashton Ellis 305 (8)

And just as we pass from music to poetry to reach certain emotions that are not to be found in the more generalised art, so we pass from Maeterlinck's æsthetic world to that of the cruder realist, in the search for certain further artistic satisfactions. Mysticism has this in common with music--that it gives voice to the broader, more generalised feelings of mankind, and hesitates to come into contact with the less ecstatic faculties that are exercised upon the harder facts of life. Maeterlinck, like Wagner, tries to lay hold upon the universal in art; but he does so simply because, again like Wagner, he is comparatively insensitive to other stimuli. And as Wagner's æsthetic holds good for the most part only of those who, like him, apprehend the world through music, so Maeterlinck's theory of drama is completely valid only for those who share his general attitude toward life and knowledge. If it is really the mystics who have the key to the knowledge of things; if, as Maeterlinck himself says in his introduction to Ruysbroeck's _L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles_, "toute certitude est en eux seuls," and that "les vérités mystiques ont sur les vérités ordinaires un privilège étrange--elles ne peuvent ni vieillir ni mourir"; if in the hypnotic semi-swoon of the faculties before the abyss of the universal we come closest to the real secret of things, then is there nothing to be added to or taken from Maeterlinck's statement of the essence of drama. If, on the other hand, the evolution of the more acutely specialised perceptions in us points to man's need of a mental system that shall embrace ever more and more of the phenomena of the world, then must we have an art that can shape these perceptions too into a beauty of their own. Did we all apprehend the universe as Maeterlinck and the mystics do--through a kind of sixth sense that is an instantaneous blend of the ordinary five; could we all arrive at his serenely philosophical outlook, and be content with so much understanding of the world as came to us in immediate intuitions--we should then see in his kind of art a mode of expression co-extensive with all that we could know or feel. But since we do not all look at life with the semi-Oriental fatalism of Maeterlinck, in whose soul the passive elements seem to outweigh the active, we have to turn to other types of dramatic art for the satisfaction of our cravings. "The poet," he says in one place, "adds to ordinary life something--I know not what--which is the poet's secret: and there comes to us a sudden revelation of life in its stupendous grandeur, in its submissiveness to the unknown powers, in its endless affinities, in its awe-inspiring misery." Well, for a great many of us there are moments when "submissiveness to the unknown powers" does not express the be-all and the end-all of life--more vivid moments of revolt, of struggle with uncertainties, of passionate assertions of personality, that have little kinship with the grey resignation of the mystic. If life is ugly and bitter, there is an art that can interest us deeply in this bitterness and ugliness, because it ministers to that deep-seated need of ours to leave no corner of life and nature unexplored. This art of the mercilessly real may not be so "philosophical" as Maeterlinck's; it may not speak to us so clearly of the "mysterious chant of the infinite, the ominous silence of the soul and of God, the murmur of Eternity on the horizon," for these voices can make themselves heard only in a wider, serener, less turbid space than ours. But just as the poet foregoes some of the formal perfection of the musician, finding his compensation in his power to touch a wider range of things, so the realist finds in the bracing, ever-interesting contact with the cruder facts of life something that compensates him for missing the broader peace of the mystic--a sense of energetic personality, of struggle with and dominion over inimical forces, that the languor of mysticism cannot provide. "No human reason," says Maeterlinck, in our actions, "no human reason; nothing but destiny." Well, thought and action, to the mystic, may be only the children of illusion; but may there not be as much illusion in passivity, in the ecstatic collapse of the intellect under the pressure of an incomprehensible world? In the Maeterlinck drama, beautiful as it is, we cannot all of us find complete satisfaction. To quote the words that he himself has used in another context: "Here we are no longer in the well-known valleys of human and psychic life. We find ourselves at the door of the third enclosure--that of the divine life of the mystics. We have to grope timidly, and make sure of every footstep, as we cross the threshold." And when we _have_ crossed the threshold, we find ourselves hungering and thirsting for the more troubled but at any rate broader life we have left behind us; just as the Wagnerian drama, mighty as it is, brings home to us the fact that there are needs of our nature that music cannot satisfy. Formal perfection, absolute homogeneity, are obtainable in an art only when we abstract it from outer incident and long reflection. Music comes before poetry in this respect, poetry before the drama, the drama before fiction. Take, from a master of reticence, an example of apparent dissipation of artistic force that Wagner would have held to prove his own theories. It is the scene in _Madame Bovary_ where Léon, expecting to see Emma, is detained at dinner by Homais. "At two o'clock they were still at table, opposite each other. The large room was emptying; the stovepipe, in the shape of a palm tree, spread its gilt leaves over the white ceiling, and near them, outside the window, in the bright sunshine, a little fountain gurgled in a white basin, where, in the midst of watercress and asparagus, three torpid lobsters stretched across to some quails that lay heaped up in a pile on their sides." "Watercress! asparagus! quails! three torpid lobsters!" Wagner would have said, "what have these to do with art? Music's manner of describing the impatience of two separated lovers is that of the mad prelude to the duet in _Tristan_. Here we have all the essential soul-states, without the admixture of crude external realities." Yet there is something in Léon's impatience that music cannot express--the dreary boredom inflicted by his companion, the helpless wandering of the mind over the insignificant uglinesses of his surroundings. This also is part of human psychology, and a part that can find expression only in words. In consideration of the wider sweep of the artistic net, we gladly abate our demands for perfection of quality in the yield; for the phenomena of the extensive and the intensive are meant to be compensatory, the one taking the burden upon itself where the strength of the other fails. Wagner erred in thinking that the union of all the arts in music-drama could render each separate art superfluous; Maeterlinck errs in thinking that the mystic, in his withdrawal to the centre of consciousness, can tell us all we desire to know of the outer circle.[58]

FOOTNOTES:

[56] I am compelled to draw attention to the words "æsthetic _systems_" because, on the appearance of this article in _The Atlantic Monthly_, a not unkindly reviewer took me to task for asserting, as he thought, that the art-_work_ of Wagner was akin to that of Maeterlinck; he pointed out, quite rightly, that César Franck's work lies closer to Maeterlinck's than does Wagner's. But of course I had never asserted that Wagner and Maeterlinck spoke to us in the same language or of the same things. I was only concerned to prove that underlying the so very different practice of the two men was a curious similarity of æsthetic theory.

[57] Compare Amiel's saying--"Action is but coarsened thought."

[58] It is interesting to note that many things in Maeterlinck either move us, by their very vagueness, just in the way that music does, or else seem like a fragment from a libretto, needing to be set to music before they can attain their full significance. Of the former class the reader will remember such things as the conclusion of _Alladine and Palomides_. To the latter class belong many of those curious scenes in which the characters keep on reiterating apparently insignificant words, to the intense annoyance of the Man in the Street, who cannot see the meaning of it all. In _Aglavaine and Selysette_ there are many passages that seem, without music, to be only the skeleton, the scaffolding, of an emotional effect. There is a salient example of the same thing in _Joyzelle_:

_Joyzelle._ Je t'embrassais la nuit, quand j'embrassais mes rêves....

_Lancéor._ Je n'ai pas eu de doute.... _Joyzelle._ Je n'ai pas eu de crainte....

_Lancéor._ Et tout m'est accordé....

_Joyzelle._ Et tout me rend heureuse!...

_Lancéor._ Que tes yeux sont profonds et pleins de confiance!...

_Joyzelle._ Et que les tiens sont purs et pleins de certitudes!...

_Lancéor._ Comme je les reconnais!...

_Joyzelle._ Et comme je les retrouve!...

_Lancéor._ Tes mains sur mes épaules ont le geste qu'elles avaient quand je les attendais sans oser m'eveiller....

_Joyzelle._ Et ton bras sur mon cou reprend la même place....

_Lancéor._ C'est ainsi qu'autrefois tes paupières se fermaient au souffle de l'amour.

_Joyzelle._ Et c'est de même aussi que les larmes montaient dans tes yeux qui s'ouvraient....

_Lancéor._ Quand le bonheur est tel....

_Joyzelle._ Le malheur ne vient pas tant que l'amour l'enchaine.

_Lancéor._ Tu m'aimes?...

_Joyzelle._ Oui....

It reads almost exactly like a libretto without its music.

_To SIR EDWARD ELGAR_

RICHARD STRAUSS AND THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE

I

Two or three years ago Richard Strauss was practically unknown in this country. A few people had heard works of his abroad; a few more had bought his complex scores and worried through them as best they could, mostly deriving from them only the impression that Strauss was getting madder and madder every year. From other and happier climes, where the demand for music is almost as great as the supply, there came weird stories of this new art. One thing was universally admitted as being beyond dispute--that Strauss was a master of orchestral effect such as the world had never seen; but all the rest was pure legend. In 1897 _Also sprach Zarathustra_ was played at the Crystal Palace; old Sir George Grove, in a private letter, expressed what was probably the opinion of most of the people who sat it out: "What can have happened to drag down music from the high level of beauty, interest, sense, force, grace, coherence and any other good quality, which it rises to in Beethoven and also (not so high) in Mendelssohn, down to the low level of ugliness and want of interest that we had in Strauss's absurd farrago ...? _Noise_ and _effect_ seems to be so much the aim now." It was the old, old story. The man who listens to a new art and is momentarily revolted by it never thinks that the deficiencies may be not in the art but in himself; with sublime arrogance he disposes in half-an-hour of a work that perhaps took a brain three times the weight of his own half a decade to write. There was some excuse for Grove; he was nearly eighty years old, and _Also sprach Zarathustra_ may well have sounded to his venerable ears like chaos come again. Other people had not the same excuse. In any case, an isolated performance of so complex a work as this was hardly the way to educate the musical masses up to the new evangel. The Strauss-flower languished decidedly for some time after in England. It is true that one could occasionally hear, either in London or in the provinces, _Till Eulenspiegel_, _Don Juan_, _Tod und Verklärung_, and a song or two, but this was all. Now and then there was a little wrangle in the press over the merits and tendencies of Strauss. One courageous group of critics dared to say that here was a composer likely to be the next big figure in musical history after Wagner; another group, equally courageous, was steadily occupied in laying up material for the laughter of future generations. Some of these latter gentlemen had already firmly secured their place in history by their opposition, two or three decades ago, to Wagner. Now, with undiminished zeal and energy, anxious to achieve a plural immortality, they industriously plied their mops against the oceanic tide of Strauss. A third group followed the banner of the ingenious gentleman who "hedged" by declaring that Strauss's music was still _sub judice_--as if _all_ musicians were not continually _sub judice_. But while it was very gratifying to behold this contest--all fighting being a testimony to life--what was all the strife about? Merely, for the most part over _Don Juan_, a comparatively early work of Strauss, in no way representative of the possibilities of his methods or of the stage of evolution at which he had even then arrived. The real Strauss was to be seen not in _Don Juan_ but in _Don Quixote_, _Also sprach Zarathustra_, and _Ein Heldenleben_. Yet the flower of the intelligence of England was wrangling noisily over three works of the composer's youth--_Till Eulenspiegel_, _Tod und Verklärung_, and _Don Juan_! It was as if, in 1881, just before the production of _Parsifal_, the English champions of the rival schools had been slaying each other over the question as to whether Wagner had not gone a little too far in _Tannhäuser_ and _Lohengrin_. Verily England was asleep.

Then Strauss himself came twice to the metropolis, first to conduct some miscellaneous works, then to produce his latest tone-poem _Ein Heldenleben_, for the first time in England. Now the interest, or at any rate the curiosity, of London was stirred a little. An abstract, disinterested passion for music itself, a cultivated desire for new things as distinguished from the merely circus interest in new performers, seems beyond the powers of all but a few souls in that vast population. Organised discussion of a new composer only comes into being when he himself happens to be in the city. As Sir Thomas Browne has it, "Some believe the better for seeing Christs sepulchre; and when they have seen the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle." As it was, it is questionable whether so large an audience would have flocked to hear--or to see--Strauss on the _Heldenleben_ occasion, if that concert had not also happened to be the first at which Mr. Henry Wood appeared after a long illness. When, some six months later, a three days' Strauss Festival was given at St. James's Hall, with the fine Amsterdam orchestra that plays him so intelligently, and with Mengelberg and Strauss himself as conductors, but this time without a convalescent Mr. Wood, the general public showed disgracefully little interest in the thing. However, the seed had been sown, and its growth has been fairly rapid. We have not yet heard in England the latest work of Strauss--the _Symphonia domestica_--and _Don Quixote_[59] has not been repeated since it was given its solitary English performance at the Festival. But _Ein Heldenleben_--the terrible _Ein Heldenleben_, the bugbear, the bogey of a couple of years ago--has become astonishingly popular. It is played quite frequently; young ladies barely out of their teens study the score and discuss the love-music appreciatively. _Till Eulenspiegel_, _Tod und Verklärung_, _Don Juan_,--these we hear so often that one no longer gets a shock when one sees them on the bills; even _Also sprach Zarathustra_ is occasionally given. _Aus Italien_ has had several performances, and the youthful Symphony in F minor (op. 12) has been played once at least. The violin concerto, the violin sonata, the 'cello sonata, and the piano quartet may all be heard from time to time. So that at last the reproach of total ignorance of Strauss is taken away from us, even if we do not hear so much of him, especially of his very latest works, as we would like.

It is a pity we cannot get more performances of his bigger works, for the amateur who does not hear him often on the orchestra, and who tries to get a knowledge of him from the easier things that can be played at home, is likely to get a very false impression of him. He has passed through so many stages of artistic development that we have only to pick up an early work of his here and there to be capable of a dogmatism concerning him that is ludicrously wrong. I can recall no example in musical history of a man with such native strength and such pronounced individuality suggesting, in his youthful works, so many other musicians of note who have gone before him. You will find in the earlier Strauss abundant traces of Mozart, of Haydn, of Beethoven, of Wagner, of Schumann, of Brahms, of Liszt. Yet the curious thing is that nowhere do we feel that Strauss has been, even for a little time, wholly under the influence of any one of these; he is always himself, though he unaccountably lapses at times into the most distinct reminiscences of the manner of other men. No one but he could have penned the vigorous Piano Sonata (op. 5); in the first movement, for example, not only the _mâle_ _tristesse_ of the mood, but the firm and flexible handling is indubitably his. Yet in this same movement, with its modern atmosphere, its modern force, and its modern audacity, he must needs insert passages here and there that go right back to the eighteenth century, in their form, their speech, and their psychology. Something of the same phenomenon meets us again in his Symphony in F minor (op. 12). The singular thing is that he has never had a real Beethoven epoch, or a real Schumann epoch, or a real Wagner epoch; but that he seemed to fall quite naturally, at times, into bygone modes of feeling and utterance, like a man whose prose style had an unaccountable tendency to lapse, every now and then, into reminiscences of the authors he read most in his youth. The _Guntram_ (op. 25) may have looked very Wagnerian when it first appeared; but as we read it now, in the light of Strauss's later work, it is clear that Wagner does not enter into a twentieth part of the opera. People could pick out the passages that resembled Wagner--particularly that extraordinary reminiscence of _Tristan_ which Strauss seems to use so unconsciously--and sum the whole opera up as the work of a mere disciple of Wagner. It was hard in those days to grasp the significance of the more individual parts of _Guntram_, or to frame to oneself a connected scheme of what the composer's psychological processes were. But we can see it all now, after _Also sprach Zarathustra_, _Don Quixote_, _Enoch Arden_ and the songs; and it is evident that _Guntram_ never owed its origin to Wagner, but to a mind of quite a different type from his. It is not Wagner's texture, it is above all not Wagner's world-view; it comes from a brain of a different outlook, making its own terminology for itself as it goes along, and only occasionally dropping into the idiom of Strauss's great forerunner. So again with the much-cited influence of Liszt upon him. That the flower of Strauss's achievement has grown up from the soil Liszt watered is unquestionable. But no one work, no section of one work, can be quoted that sounds as if it came direct from Liszt. With the exception of some half-dozen of the juvenile writings, there is nothing of Strauss that does not, in spite of its suggestions of this or that predecessor, belong as completely to him as _Orfeo_ does to Gluck or _Lohengrin_ to Wagner; while in the work of the last few years, the years of attained maturity and full self-consciousness, he stands proudly, loftily alone, unique among musicians long before he had reached his fortieth year. Yet the tradition that he is merely an artificial blend of Wagner and Liszt will probably hold the field for a long time to come.

So great, again, is the distance between his earlier and his later work that one who only knows him from the efforts of his adolescence is certain to misconceive him. The present Strauss commands respect even from those who think he is merely using his great gifts to achieve perversity and ugliness; but we may go through page after page of his earliest work and yet hardly once come across anything that would make us believe we were face to face with genius. Some of it, like the _Fünf Klavierstücke_ (op. 3) and the _Stimmungsbilder_ (op. 9), is quite mediocre at times, commonplace in rhythm, weak in structure, and decidedly cheap in melody. Even where his early work was most excellent--and some of it was admirable--it was impossible to say from it that the composer was one of the predestined spirits of music, fated to remove landmarks, to explore undiscovered countries. Clearly it was not a common talent; even in those days it was generally vigorous, audacious, self-confident; but it rarely flamed up into incandescence. In those years of apprenticeship Strauss was quietly and almost unconsciously evolving a musical bias that was to re-mould the æsthetics of music--doubtful yet as to whither his own ideals were drawing him, and no doubt puzzled at times at his failure to get precisely the picture he would have liked, but still remaining autonomous, a new and vigorous force aiming at an idiom of its own. We see now how hopelessly absurd it is to judge the composer of _Also sprach Zarathustra_ by any of the standards of the past--that the man's whole mind is unique, seeing things in music that no one ever saw before, and taking the most direct, even if most perilous, path to the expression of them. It took him a long time to learn that he had no great faculty for abstract beauty, for weaving the impalpable stuff of a vision into something that lives and shall be immortal, like the sculptor's work, by virtue of the sheer harmony of every element of its being. The great test of the existence of this order of beauty in a musician is to be had in his slow movements. Mere vigour of rhythm and intensity of colour here go for less than anywhere else: in this ideal, abstracted world, where the soul listens darkling, brooding upon the mystery of things like the dove upon the waters, the musician's sense of sheer self-existent beauty must be at its finest; and the complete absorption in pure tone that such a mood demands is the quality of the absolute rather than of the poetic musician. I am not for a moment, of course, denying that Strauss has written some slow passages which are surcharged with emotional beauty--such as the "Redemption" theme at the end of _Tod und Verklärung_, the noble _mit Andacht_ section at the beginning of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the pathetic death-music in _Don Quixote_, or the end of _Ein Heldenleben_. What I mean is that his is not the order of musical mind to which the extended formalism of the symphony, with its intentness on architectonic effect, is the most propitious. His genius is for the literary rather than for the architectural or sculpturesque.

Look, for example, at his songs. If his gift were for sheer musical beauty, the melody that sings from pure joy in itself, it would certainly appear here if anywhere. Yet among all his songs I cannot recall more than one or two that seem to be written out of the mere heart of lyrism itself; while in all the really great ones the magic and the power come not from pure melodic or harmonic loveliness, but from the sense they give us of absolute emotional veracity--as it were a man speaking upon a lofty subject very gravely and with intense conviction, and so attaining, not the rapturous abandonment of poetry, but an eloquent, impassioned, heart-searching prose.

Strauss is perhaps not a great melodist, if we restrict that term to the meaning it has acquired in the absolute music of the past. Only once, I think--in the slow movement of the Piano Quartet (op. 13)--does he sing himself into that ideal world of ecstasy and enchantment in which the older musicians spent their most golden hours. Here, indeed, he loses sight of that real world of men and things which it has been his glory to make musical for us in his later work; here, indeed, he is content to sing in rapt absorption, content to pour out a flood of tone that shall be all it is meant to be if it is divine, merely "a wonder and a wild desire." This movement stands unique among Strauss's work, both in its pure beauty and in its æsthetic purpose. For once in his life, at all events, the great realist has had his honeyed hour of idealism. But the very qualities of alertness, of quick interest in life, which have gone to make Strauss, in his later music, the symbol of a new era of æsthetics, have prevented him from falling often into that ecstatic, clairvoyant swoon from which the music of the great dreamers has been born. A melody, with him, is not something irresponsibly beautiful, as sheer a delight to the ear as the flight of a bird or the play of sunlight on the water are to the eye, but a commentary upon a character or a situation, aiming at veracity in the first place rather than at self-existent beauty. Hence that impression of tortuous, huddled drawing which we get at times in a work like _Guntram_, where his hand has not yet learned to follow the inward vision with complete fidelity. Hence also the feeling given us occasionally, by some of his melodies, that they are bordering perilously on the commonplace or the obvious--as in the cadence of the charming little folk-song with which _Till Eulenspiegel_ ends, or in one or two portions of the finale of _Tod und Verklärung_. The closer a musician comes to pure simplicity the more difficult is it to achieve verisimilitude without dropping into bathos. If Strauss has now and again made us feel that it is only a step from the sublime to the ridiculous, it behoves us to remember also that no musician has ever been so triumphant in his handling of the simplest material--as in some passages of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the ending of _Ein Heldenleben_, the Sancho Panza music in _Don Quixote_, or the music of the children in _Feuersnot_. If Tchaikovski brought the last new shudder into music, Strauss has endowed it with a new simplicity. It is this, indeed, that makes him Strauss; for paradoxical as it may seem, this builder of colossal tone-poems, this wielder of the mightiest orchestral language ever yet spoken, this Mad Mullah of harmony, is what he is because he has dared to throw over almost all the conventions that have clustered round the art in the last two hundred years. He is complex because he is simple; he appears so wildly artificial because he is absolutely natural; he is called sophisticated because he casts aside all artifice and speaks like the natural musical man. To establish which position, let us digress for a moment into a discussion of æsthetics.

II

Of all the arts, music is the one whose ideal of form is the loftiest, the most exacting, the most imperative; the art in which we are least willing to tolerate any defection from the highest we can conceive. This, indeed, has been the cause both of the rapid development of music in comparison with the other arts, and of the frenetic warfare of the schools in one generation after another. The intensity of the great musician's desire for ideal perfection in his art leads to his carrying it, within a few years, over a curve of evolution that it takes a century for the other arts to describe. This æsthetic concentration gave us the Beethoven symphony and the Wagner music-drama--each the most perfect thing of its kind, each the most perfect expression of the musical needs of the generation that brought it into life. At the same time this principle of evolution has caused the world, when it discovered how absolutely complete was the musician's achievement of the particular thing he had aimed at, to desire to rest permanently in that form, to regard it as the final word in music. It was so with the symphony according to Beethoven, and with the opera according to Wagner. Now what we have to recognise in the case of Richard Strauss is that he is the destroyer--or at any rate, the symbol of destruction--of all previous values, as Nietzsche would say, and the creator at once of a new expression and a new form.

Music could no more stop at Wagner than it could stop at Bach, Gluck, or Beethoven. The expansion of manner which music underwent at the hands of each of these men, be it noted, was the fruit of a correlative expansion of the mental world of the musician--not the individual musician, but the type. The great interest of Wagner for many of us is that with him, for the first time, music aimed at becoming co-extensive with human life. (So much, I think, may be broadly postulated without entering on very contentious grounds, if we complete the proposition by saying that Berlioz and Liszt--the Liszt of the twelve symphonic poems, the _Dante_ symphony and the _Faust_ symphony--are to be understood as subsumed under Wagner.) But the very element in his work that made Wagner an unquestionable evolution from Beethoven--the clear perception that in the symphony pure and simple you could never, do what you would, advance entirely out of the decorative into the human, that to concern herself more pointedly with man and the world, music must call in the aid of poetry, with its wider and deeper associations with human life--this was at the same time, curiously enough, the element that marked the limits of the opera and foretold its ultimate passing away. Opera, it is now evident, is _not_ the form of either the present or the future. It was once the revolutionary form, and under its red banner men imbrued their hands with the gore of their fellow-men; now it is a classic, and in twenty years we shall have a school that quotes its Wagner against the new troublers of our musical conventions as a former school quoted Mozart and Beethoven against Wagner. And why is the opera now beginning to be recognised as a limited form, instead of the universal form which Wagner fondly hoped to make it? Simply because it has now become clear to us that the admixture of the human voice in music really limits the range of the art as much as the absence of it formerly limited the symphony. What the old music needed was fertilisation by speech, as Wagner never wearied of telling us; what music at present needs is emancipation from the tyranny of speech. A glance at the æsthetic of the art will make this seem less paradoxical than it sounds at first.

As I have tried to show in another essay in this volume, the people who despise programme music as a derogation from the high nature and pure origin of the art are labouring under a delusion. Music, they say, ought to be able to stand alone, in splendid isolation as it were; and they regard it as a sign of musical weakness when a composer, associating himself with the literary element of poetry, "calls in to his aid a foreign art," as they express it. All this is based upon a misunderstanding of the real essence of music, and a faulty analysis of the psychological states from which it has sprung. From the very infancy of the art, there have been two main impulses stimulating the musician--the abstract and the human, the decorative and the poetic. The fact that these two are almost always interblended, in one proportion or another, in the actual music we know, does not in any way upset the analysis. Broadly speaking, the revolution effected by Wagner was precisely an infusion of a greater human pre-occupation into an art that had previously been over-intent on the architectural or decorative. He saw that it was impossible for a modern man to say all he wanted to say in a form that attributed relatively too much importance to the propriety of the pattern, and left too little opportunity for the sleuth-like tracking of thoughts as fluid, as complex, as evasive as life itself. On the one hand the transition had to be made from inarticulate to articulate tone, from music as a generalised expression to music as a particularised expression of life; and this could only be done by conquering for her, by means of speech, a new territory of human interests in which she was to be supreme. On the other hand, there had to be a general break-up of the older official form, and a general discarding of useless garments in order that the limbs of this fresh young art might move more freely. What Wagner's achievement was we know. Apart from his stupendous musical gifts, he will live by the closeness of the bearing of his thought upon actual life; for he was searchingly real, albeit in his own semi-romantic way.

But the impetus given to music by Wagner could not end where he desired it to end. Already, in his own lifetime, Berlioz and Liszt had hit upon a form of symphonic poem, which, had it not been for the overwhelming vogue of Wagner's operas, would probably have come to be recognised as the pre-eminent form of the nineteenth century. It must always be remembered that Liszt was no mere imitator of Wagner, but that they worked separately for many years on much the same general æsthetic lines--Liszt being, if anything, the one of the twain who saw first the new possibilities of modern music. Now that Wagner's work is done and become a thing of the past--the art-form which he perfected having died with him, so far as we can see at present--the long-submerged trail of Liszt is making its reappearance. Despised as a composer in his own epoch, he is now having a posthumous and vicarious justification in Richard Strauss. Like the river Arethusa, that was lost in one place and came to light again in another, the peculiar psychology of the symphonic poem according to Liszt re-emerges in _Tod und Verklärung_ and _Also sprach Zarathustra_, after having been hidden for half a century by the more lyrical, less "representative" art of _Tristan_ and the _Meistersinger_. The strong point of Strauss is just that he has shown how often speech can with the greatest advantage be discarded in music, because speech, while a fertilising element up to a certain point, becomes a positive obstruction when once that point has been passed. Where there are words there is necessarily a human voice, and where there is a voice you are necessarily bound by the limitations of the voice, and shut out from one-half of the circle of life. You can, of course, accept these limitations as far as the voice itself is concerned, and leave to the orchestra the portrayal of things that are too vast, too mysterious, or too terrible to be sung--which was the method of Wagner. But the success of this system depends upon the quality of your subject; and when you come to the big modern material, and desire to look through music at the life and the philosophy of your own day, you will find that the voice is, as often as not, a hindrance. A subject like _Also sprach Zarathustra_, for example, neither demands nor would tolerate the human voice in a musical setting of it. Nietzsche's book is not lyrical, not dramatic; it is--or purports to be--a piece of philosophy, a reflection upon the cosmos as it appears to a bitter, disillusioned modern man. In weaving music into a gigantic scheme like this, the tiny egoistic tinkle of the human voice would be a ludicrous descent into bathos.[60] We have only to look round at the music of the past hundred years to see that, as its psychology extended, it first of all required speech to gain it access to one new territory, and then had to throw over speech in order to secure entrance into a territory still more remote and more mysterious. This is the environment towards which Strauss has had to feel his way through one experiment after another.

Now just as Wagner's music, though more complex than the old art in certain respects, was simpler than the old in that it substituted a natural for a stilted form of operatic speech--a revolution similar to that effected in English poetry by the lyrical writers of the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries--so Strauss represents yet another movement towards naturalness, when compared with contemporary music-makers like Brahms or even Tchaikovski. The proof of this is writ large over almost all his music, from opus 5 onwards; it is visible everywhere, in his melodies, his rhythms, his harmonies, his _facture_. Now and again, of course, there is a lapse into the polite formalities which come so fatally easy to the musician of all artists. But on the whole Strauss gives one the impression of a singularly fresh and unconventional temperament, whose new mode of vision spontaneously generates its own new manner of utterance. The peculiar quality of his mature style is its absolute _Selbstständigkeit_--its entire independence, throughout its whole texture, of any laws but its own. I need not speak of his marvellous orchestration, for his overlordship there is unquestionable. But we need only look at his harmonies--those harmonies which are the horror of a great many people who are by no means academics--to see how supremely natural, how infinitely remote from the mere desire to stagger humanity,[61] is the style of Strauss even in its most defiant moments.[62] What was said of old of the harmonies of Wagner is now being said of the harmonies of his successor. I will frankly admit that there are certain things among them which are a cruel laceration of our ears--things at which we can only cross ourselves piously, as at the profanity of the natural man at the street corner, and hurry on our way. These deviations from the normal are mostly to be seen in his songs, where he permits himself a much broader license than in any of his other works. For the rest, it will be found that, a few eccentricities apart, our first prejudice against most of his novel harmonies and progressions is due simply to their unexpectedness, and that as soon as we have grown accustomed to them they seem quite logical and inevitable. Undoubtedly our palate for harmony has been cloyed by too much of the saccharine; the tonic, astringent quality of the discord has not yet been sufficiently appreciated by any musician but Strauss. Like all other superstitions, the harmonic superstition cannot survive the bold experimenter. One's faith in the malign powers that dog the footsteps of him who walks under a ladder, or spills the salt at table, receives a rude shock when we find a man tempting Providence in this way and coming to no particular harm; and many things in music that we would _à priori_ pronounce impossible look quite simple and natural when they are actually done. To end a big orchestral work with reiterated successions of the chord of B natural followed by the tonic of C natural seems like a device of Colney Hatch; but it is strangely suggestive and hugely impressive in _Also sprach Zarathustra_. Of course the invention and elaboration of a new technique are very difficult matters; and it is only to be expected that here and there Strauss should give us the impression of not being quite at home even in his own territory. Nothing could be more audacious, or, as a rule, more successful, than his bland persistence in a certain figure or a certain sequence when the chances are all in favour of the thing toppling down like a house of cards long before he can reach the summit; there is something positively grim and eerie, at times, in the _nonchalant_ way Strauss steers his bark through all the dangers of the musical deep. In the lovely song _Ich schwebe_ (op. 48, No. 2), for example, one is alternately astonished and amused at the freedom of the harmonic sequences; one hardly knows whether to be angry at the cool unconventionality with which we are being treated, or to chuckle with delight at the sheer impudence of the performance. Strauss seems to think it a fallacy to look upon chords as being built up from a certain base. In a way, his system is a reversion to the view of the old contrapuntists, that music is a matter of a series of horizontal lines, not of the vertical lines into which the thoughts of the modern harmonist have come to flow. Substitute horizontal figures or groups for horizontal lines, and we have the distinction between the harmonic Strauss in his more daring moments, and, say, the harmonic Tchaikovski. A certain sequence of chords has to be carried through, willy-nilly, in one part of the piano or of the orchestra; another and quite independent sequence has to be carried through, willy-nilly, in another part. They are heard against each other at every point of their career. If they blend, according to the current notions of harmony, well and good; if they do not, equally well and good. You are only shocked for the moment, says Strauss, because your ear has become sophisticated, artificialised, by dwelling too long in the conventional harmonic atmosphere that has been manufactured for you; you must learn to breathe a new atmosphere, to take delight in a new type of musical sequence, wherein opposing notes or opposing chords go each to its own appointed end, regardless of isolated harmonic effects, or of certain cramping formalities known as "resolutions." We have to learn to think horizontally. In musical matters, however, it takes even the most advanced of us a little time to readjust our point of view; and whether it is that we are not yet quite worthy of the light of the new dispensation, or whether the voice of the prophet fails him at times and his speech becomes a little thick and his thought a trifle incoherent, it is certain that Strauss now and again tries our patience somewhat. Here and there in _Ein Heldenleben_ and some of the maddest of the songs we feel that no amount of familiarity with the music will ever make us like certain effects--or defects--of harmony; and even in a great song like the _Traum durch die Dämmerung_ (op. 29, No. 1) we have an uneasy feeling, at more than one point, that instead of Strauss being the master he has become the servant of his material. There is just a suspicion, here and there, that he is working his pre-ordained sequence a shade too rigidly, and that he would have gained by relaxing it a little. In any case, as I have already remarked, it is generally in his songs--which, beautiful as they are, are not the most important part of his work--that his harmonic system is most apt to take our breath away; though I cannot agree with a recent writer that the harmonies are merely "wild experimentation." In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred they seem to me perfectly spontaneous, even when they are most trying; I think Strauss writes precisely as he feels, without any mere attempt, in cold blood, to achieve the unexpected or the impossible. One frequent cause of the novelty of his harmonic progressions is that he resolves the constituent tones of his chords in any part of the gamut he chooses. This, of course, is only a continuance of a tendency that has been going on in music for the last hundred years; and Wagner and Liszt have made certain resolutions of this kind so familiar to us that they now excite no comment. In another half-century the majority of the new harmonies and new resolutions of Strauss will probably be part of the common vocabulary of every musical penny-a-liner.

Whatever may be thought, however, of the sincerity or artificiality of his harmonies, there can be no question that in his melodies and his rhythms he is pre-eminently natural and unforced. Once he had got rid of the suspicion of mediocrity that hung about him in his earlier works, owing to his having momentarily taken up with the wrong artistic company, he made rapid progress along a line that was peculiarly his own. No one can listen to _Don Juan_, for example (op. 20), without feeling how exquisitely fresh is the work, how absolutely adolescent in the best sense. Here for the first time we have a revelation of what the future Strauss was to be--the writer of a new music, in which the expression and the technique shall follow the poetic idea with an unquestioning, unswerving fidelity. He is now acquiring an instrument of speech that, in its power to bite into the essentials of an object, reminds us of the consummate style of Flaubert or Maupassant; the realist Strauss is coming into view. All the previous works of any importance--the Symphony in F minor (op. 12), the String Quartet (op. 13), the _Wanderers Sturmlied_ (op. 14), _Aus Italien_ (op. 16), and the Violin Sonata (op. 18)--had been preliminary studies for this. In these works we see Strauss finally emerging from the slough of polite acquiescence in the manners of his forerunners which had been now and then painfully evident in the _Fünf Klavierstücke_ (op. 3) and the _Stimmungsbilder_ (op. 9), and even at times in the virile, breezy Piano Sonata (op. 5). He gradually forms a musical style of his own, in which the idiom is extraordinarily spontaneous and forceful. The melody becomes more serpentiform, more flexibly articulated, more and more independent, in its rhythm, of the four or eight-bar props upon which composers generally find it so convenient to lean. I do not refer so much to the mere crossing or interlocking of rhythms which the _Wanderers Sturmlied_ and _Also sprach Zarathustra_ exhibit here and there, for this is more or less an affair of merely conscious technique, which may, as is frequently the case in Brahms, exist rather on paper than in actuality, and make more impression on the eye than on the ear. The rhythmical interest of the juvenile works of Strauss lies rather in the growing sense of perfect freedom and naturalness in the trajectory of the melodies. All the new qualities of the works that lie between opus 12 and opus 18 come to their fine fruition in _Don Juan_, which is the first work of Strauss that shows in something like its entirety the true psychology, æsthetic and moral, of the man.

III

Upon some features of that psychology--its sincerity, its originality, its artistic fearlessness--I have already touched. Strauss, however, is an epoch-making man not only in virtue of his expression and his technique, but in virtue of the range and the quality of his subjects. He is the first complete realist in music. The Romantic movement came to a somewhat belated head in Wagner, who had been the chief master of the ceremonies at the prolonged funeral of the classical spirit. The Romantic movement persisted longer in music than in any of the other arts; and even in our own day it still makes an occasional ineffectual effort to raise its old head, ludicrous now with its faded garlands of flowers overhanging the wrinkled cheeks. But it has done its work, and the future is with the men who live not in that old and somewhat artificial world of gloomy forests, enchanted castles, men that are like gods and gods that are like men, impossible maidens, and superannuated professors of magic,[63] but in a world recognisably similar to that in which we ourselves move from day to day. We like our art to have a rather more acrid taste, and to come to closer quarters with reality. Even the apparatus of the Wagnerian opera seems to us a trifle _vieux-jeu_ in these days. Strauss has wisely recognised that the operatic form, at its worst a ludicrous parody on life, is at its best only a compromise, limited in its choice of subjects no less than in its structure. Much greater freedom is to be had in the symphonic poem, or in other purely instrumental modern forms, because here we have at once a wider range of subjects open to us, and a medium of expression into which the voice, with its limiting associations, does not enter. Nothing but the freest, most expansive of forms could be suited to the peculiar temperament of a realist like Strauss, and fine as his own opera work is, bubbling over, as _Feuersnot_ is, with life and humour, it is not there that we see the essential Strauss.

For it is as a realist that he is most remarkable. He is not a dreamer, nor a philosopher, except in so far as philosophy--in Mr. Meredith's sense of the term--is at the centre of every great artist's vision of life. He is at his best in studies of character in action, as in _Till Eulenspiegel_ and _Don Quixote_; and he follows his trail with the most cheerful disregard as to whether his work is or is not formal music in the older acceptations of the word. Further, his interest is in human life as a whole, not in the one wearisome episode of the eternal masculine and the eternal feminine. Strauss's is the cleanest, most sexless, most athletic music I know. Just as it is the easiest thing in the world to make love, so is the making of love-music the easiest part of the musician's trade. It is one other sign of the death of the Romantic spirit and the revival of realism in Strauss that he should have thrown over almost all the old erotic tags of the musician--though he can be passionate enough upon occasion--in order to tell the story, in the true modern spirit, of other elements in human life that also have their poetry and their pathos. One refreshing characteristic of the earlier works--such as the Piano Sonata, the Violin Sonata, and the Piano Quartet--was their unclouded virility, their total freedom from those phantasms of sex that have been hovering over so much of our music during the past century. The adolescent work of Strauss is proud, vigorous, uncontaminated, Greek in quality. Even in the _Don Juan_, it may be noted, his interest is in another aspect of the story than the blatantly erotic; and the music itself is plainly not the work of a Romanticist but of a realist and humanist. The love-themes in _Don Juan_ are not sexual in the way that Wagner or Tchaikovski, for example, would have made them. Even in his songs his love-making is grave and philosophical, with none of the feline sex-element showing through it that is so prominent in Wagner; Strauss is untroubled by the _hysterica passio_ of the tiles. For this generation, at all events, the last word in mere sex-music has been said in _Tristan and Isolde_; and instead of imitating his weaker brethren, who occupy themselves energetically in vending the spilth of Wagner's wine, Strauss has turned his eyes upon other elements than the erotic in the human composition. Hence the cosmic magnificence of conception of _Also sprach Zarathustra_, the graphic humour of _Till Eulenspiegel_, and the supreme humanity of his greatest work, _Don Quixote_.